The project was highly controversial amongst the islanders and the plans were approved by only a single decisive vote in the municipal council.
His workmates marked the stone using a sliver of bamboo daubed with red oxide, checked their line with a builder's square and a piece of string, and turned it back to the stone mover, who gave it two strategic taps with a hammer and a rough iron chisel before cleaving away the excess with a single decisive blow.
What they got was no less unique in history: a great power at the seeming height of its strength and glory, with destructive capabilities beyond imagining and a military unmatched on the planet, unable to score a single decisive victory across an increasingly large swath of the planet or impose its will, however brutally, on seemingly far weaker, less well-armed opponents.
Forget about finding a single, decisive explanation for the plunge.
American war planners say no single, decisive moment tipped the scales.
The appearance of these centralized states is arguably the single most decisive alteration in economic, and perhaps in all, history.
In Tunisia probably the single most decisive fact was that the army refused to shoot unarmed demonstrators at a critical moment.
The same is true, of course, of Jean-Luc Godard's "Histoire(s) du Cinéma," perhaps the single most decisive work of compilation ever created and one in which, along with the radically analytical editing devices, Godard employed text, onscreen and on the soundtrack, that is a work of rare critical insight that could stand on its own as a major piece of writing.
The single most decisive event, however, in Augustine's philosophical development has to be his encounter with those unnamed books of the Platonists in Milan in 384.
